The Family for the Whole Family

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"Then I drive him out to the woods. Badda bing badda bang. Three in back of the head, that's the end of Little Paulie. So what do you think Frankie says when I report back in? 'Little Paulie? Nah, I told you to pop Big Paulie!' That's the problem with our business, too many guys named Paulie."

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What do you do when you need some big, tough guys to menace the heroes, but don't want to risk having them actually, you know, hurt anybody? You call in The Family for the Whole Family. They're not the scary, make-it-look-like-an-accident mobsters seen in Mafia movies; they're the harmless, ineffectual, and very, verystupid mobsters that are a staple of family-oriented comedies. No matter how many of them are in their group, you can be sure of two things: there will only be one shared gun among them (if they thought to pack any weapons at all), and they'll always forget that there's a trigger on it when they want to threaten someone.

Despite the name, this brand of goon doesn't necessarily have to be a member of The Mafia. They can be from any group who is normally considered dangerous by definition (i.e. gangsters, thieves, spies, hitmen, Yakuza, escaped criminals, et al), but when appearing in the context of a PG-rated film becomes highly susceptible to messy booby traps, banana peels, and precocious youngsters who know karate.

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In the 1990s, it was popular to add these characters to Dom Com movies to pad the script with villains for a Home Alone-inspired climax. (John Hughes, who wrote the script for Home Alone and a few of the other examples on this page, loved this trope.) Just to drive home the point of them being totally superfluous to the point of the movie, they are totally absent from most trailers and summaries of the film - only existing for some B-plot slapstick gags to add an extra 20 minutes on to what would otherwise be only 1 hour of screentime.
Obviously a subtrope of Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.

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Keep in mind that this trope is not "Villains who are not very evil." This trope concerns villains who are willing to commit heinous crimes, but are simply incapable of doing so because of their incompetence.

Examples:

The Air Pirates in Porco Rosso aren't very skilled, either. Curtis was more dangerous then the whole bunch of them.

The pirates seem less effectual than they actually are because we only ever see them fighting Porco, who is quite possibly the most skilled ace in the Mediterranean. At the beginning of the film, the Mama Aiuto Gang manages to heist a cargo ship and take a group of schoolgirls hostage. Given, the girls proceed to walk all over them, but that illustrates their latent honorable tendencies.

Surprisingly, Team Rocket is only on the border of this. Sure, the Terrible Trio are G-rated Harmless Villains, but every once in a while you're reminded that they're the oddballs of a larger and much more dangerous syndicate. In fact, Jessie, James, and Meowth are very lucky to still have their job!

Max: All those Team Rocket guys, and us only having three to deal with? We're lucky.

The Oedo Family in Gokusen. The town's people loves them, the grandfather utterly loves his granddaughter, and they are ready to help anyway they can. Did I mention they are one of the most powerful yakuzas in Japan?

The Wong Family in Rosario + Vampire employs numerous powerful and intimidating monsters, they were founded by one of the Three Dark Lords, and they're currently headed by the most powerful Sword and SorcererBattle Couple around. They throw a ridiculously lavish and flamboyant welcome party when the heir brings home friends, and Inner Moka notes them to be "a noisy bunch". Overall, they're more cheerful than you'd expect.

Bodacious Space Pirates: They rob tourist yachts and take on bounties for odd jobs. Really, the whole "space privateer" thing has already been bogged down by the local bureaucracy, making teenage girls the perfect star-system neighborhood tax collectors... And then they kidnap a multibillionaire heiress so she can dump her hipster fiancée and get married to her girlfriend. And take down a prototype battlespace fortress.

Films

UHF ultimately subverts this: the goons at first try to simply keep Stanley out of the way to sabotage the U-62 telethon, but after one pratfall too many, they get pissed off enough to decide on taking both him and George for "the long ride." The only thing that stops them from just shooting the two is a certain "SUPPLIES!!" waiting in a utility closet.

The idiot burglars Harry and Marv from Home Alone are a classic example, though also somewhat of a deconstruction. Although they are incompetent enough to fall into Kevin's ill-conceived traps, the traps don't actually stop them, but instead just piss them off. Although they originally just wanted to loot the house of its valuables and weren't interested in hurting Kevin, their focus ends up shifting from robbing the house to getting revenge for all the pain that the kid has put them through. Eventually they do catch him, and he is only saved from their wrath by a neighbor coming up behind them and knocking them out with a shovel.

3 Ninjas; a movie series where NINJAS are effortlessly defeated by children, who realistically, would get slaughtered like helpless puppies. Particularly pathetic in the case of Tum-Tum, the youngest of the group, who looks to be about only five years old. Sure the ninjas in the films weren't exactly of the finest order (wearing black outfits in broad daylight, among other things), but still the idea that a small child can beat up legions of grown men, trained to be dangerous combatants, gets a little ridiculous really quickly. He even rated second place on 6 Supposed Action Heroes You Could Probably Take In A Fight.

You know what happens when a 5-year-old performs a flying kick against a grown man? The kid falls on his barely- out-of-diapers ass. Why does this happen? Physics. It's the law and everyone knows you can't fight the law, especially if you weigh 30 pounds and stand 3-feet-tall.

Houseguest. The mob boss even calls them out on their stupidity...but he still gives them repeated chances to go after Franklin (instead, you know, sending in someone more competent), putting his intelligence in question as well. Unlike some of these examples though, the mobsters might be inept but their presence is what drives the plot of the movie.

A group of mobsters help out Arnold Schwarzenegger and Vanessa Williams in Eraser. They're a bit of a subversion in that they're fairly competent when they have to be (skillfully slaughtering their more evil counterparts), but they're still pretty stupid much of the time.

Some Like It Hot has "Spats" Colombo and his gang. They're briefly competent at the beginning (they supposedly commit the St. Valentine's Day Massacre), and then spend the rest of the movie being completely ineffectual until they're eventually killed by rival gangsters (who themselves are stupid enough to do this by having another gangster with a tommygun jump out of a giant cake in a crowded hotel in a room where all the gangsters are meeting) near the end.

101 Dalmatians has Horace and Jasper, the pair of bumbling, oafish criminals hired by Cruella DeVille to help with her plans to make a Dalmatian-fur coat.

Guys and Dolls has Big Jule from Chicago. Although he carries a gun, he only uses its existence to threaten people and is easily disarmed with one punch.

Mike Nelson's novel Death Rat! features several expatriate Danes observing the protagonist. Their ineptitude stems mostly from the fact that they aren't really even bad guys; they're just old associates of the antagonist who had been browbeaten into assisting him. The only time they stand up to him is when he makes the mistake of insulting their beloved pickled herring.

While not as inept as other examples, the Mob in the Myth Adventures novels is bizarrely gullible, falling for even more elementary con games than the series' average villains.

Most of the plot of the stage musical Kiss Me Kate is driven by a pair of humourously ignorant gangsters, although they have a few Black Comedy moments as well, such as when they reminisce about dumping people in the Potomac.

Likewise, Guys and Dolls has Big Jule from Chicago. Although he carries a gun, he only uses its existence to threaten people and is easily disarmed with one punch.

Moonface Martin in Anything Goes is a perfectly harmless gangster who genuinely tries to help the hero and also smuggles a tommy gun on board... just in case.

Sugar is essentially the musical version of Some Like It Hot. "Spats" Palazzo is no more effectual post-Massacre than "Spats" Colombo was. Hilariously, he and his gang do a tap dance while chanting "We're gonna tear this whole damn town apart" (looking for the escaped witnesses), which just hangs a lampshade on how credible of a threat they're going to be.

The Starter Villain Mafia of Cooks do seem to rob people and drive non-Mafia restaurants out of business, but they also do things like punch barrels dressed as old ladies to scare people. And while they're happy to wallop Hat Kid if she lets them, Hat Kid and her trust umbrella are more than a match for any Mafia goons. They later show up in Subcon Forest, but as victims to the far more dangerous inhabitants of the Forest.

Team Rocket in Pokémon Red and Blue are portrayed as an organized crime group, but are too laughably ill-equipped to keep an 11-year-old from easily storming their base by force. This parody comic perfectly captures the essence of this example.

The Mafia's appearances are mostly played for laughs on The Simpsons, as is the Robot Mafia on Futurama.

The Simpsons mafia can be consider something of a subversion, as some of the stuff they do is ridiculous and played for laughs, and other stuff is actually violent or highly illegal (like making loans and beating people when they can't pay them, or rigging sports events) yet it's also played for laughs. They are shown dumping a dead body (wrapped in a length of carpet) into a trash bin in a 1999 episode, so they clearly are able to commit murder when necessary.

The Robot Mafia plays this up. The mafia is only three robotsnote four when "Blotto" (Bender) briefly joins. They act tough, but so far they haven't killed anybody onscreen. They machine gunned a robot who owed them in their first appearance, but being a robot, he just got back up (it's clear they didn't even intend it to kill him, as they say "Consider that a warning"). One of them mentions giving somebody Cement Shoes, which he enjoyed, because they were lighter than his lead ones. They came pretty close to burning the Planet Express crew up though, and they would have killed Flexo if Bender hadn't bent the unbendable girder they dropped on him. Of the three, Clamps is probably the most violent, but generally he's restrained by the Donbot (or, sometimes, by Joey Mousepad) from carrying through.

Big Daddy's organization in The Fairly Oddparents acts like your typical gangster family, with Big Daddy himself even voiced by Tony Sirocio, but they work in garbage collection with mob-like tactics and some gangster work on the side.

Luigi Vendetta, the opera-singing juvenile Canadian Mafia boss Kick sends to exact revenge on his brother Brad in Kick Buttowski.

The Crooks in C.O.P.S. are supposed to be a mafia organization, but since stealing is basically the only crime you're really even allowed to show on a kid's cartoon, they spend most of their time (unsuccessfully) robbing and burglarizing rather than racketeering and legbreaking.

Boo Boo the ghost on Ruby Gloom is part of a ghost mafia where he tries in vain to scare others.

In Jackie Chan Adventures, the heroes often fight the Enforcers, a bunch of hired goons who worked for a gang called the Dark Hand. However they are verywoefully incompetent criminals, usually treated as recurring joke villains instead of actual threats. The Dark Hand Enforcers never even use any guns in combat (Finn did own a pistol at one point, but he never gets the chance to fire it).

An episode of the The Little Mermaid TV series did this, with Ariel and one of her sisters having to find off a pair of bumbling saltwater crocodile thieves while they were "beached" (that is, grounded) at the palace.

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